Researchers Find Men and Women Are Different Colors

Researchers at Brown University have discovered that men and women have different skin colors. Men are red, and women are green.

Analyzing dozens of faces, scientist Michael J. Tarr and graduate student Adrian Nestor have found that men tend to have more of a reddish skin, while women are sporting greenish skin.

“Color information is very robust and useful for telling a man from a woman,” said Tarr. “It's a demonstration that color can be useful in visual object recognition.”

These findings can provide useful information to consumers and industries, such as advertising and makeup application of women.

Tarr analyzed about 200 images of Caucasian male and females located in a data bank at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany. Each image was photographed using a 3-D scanner and under the same lighting conditions. Each subject also wore no makeup of any kind. Using a MatLab program, he then looked at the amount of red and green pigments in their faces.

He found that men tend to have more red in their faces and women have more green.

“If it is on the more red end of the spectrum (the face) had a higher probability of being male. Conversely, if it is on the green end of the spectrum (the face) had a higher probability of being female,” Tarr said.

They also did another study to take this a step further, and had subjects determine the gender of an androgynous image that was compiled from the 200 images previously used. They separated the images according to the gender picked by the subjects. Researchers analyzed the color content and found that the male piles were redder and the female piles were greener.

While some women’s faces are much redder and some men’s faces are greener, this research studied the overall results and concluded that observers use the color of a face when trying to decide its gender.

This study is published online in the journal Psychological Science.

Maybe this research could support the statement that Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. What do you think?

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